Parliament diary: BJD trying to play peacemaker in the Lok Sabha

Like the Rajya Sabha, the Lok Sabha is also getting disrupted everyday due to the issue of demonetisation. Today on the 10th day of the Winter session, the treasury bench sought the help of Biju Janata Dal to broker a deal between the ruling party and the Opposition. BJD leaders of the Lok Sabha tried to reach out to a section of the Opposition with a proposal to change the demand for a debate on demonetisation under Rule 184 instead of the adjournment motion. The BJD is the only party in the Opposition that is supporting the demonetisation move. The rest of the Opposition is adamant that it wants a debate under Rule 56, which is essentially a censure motion and calls for mandatory voting after the debate. The Speaker has not agreed to the Opposition’s demand of an adjournment motion. It is to resolve this impasse in the House that the BJD is proposing a discussion under Rule 184, which also has a provision for voting. The Opposition has been pushing for voting because it wants to embarrass the NDA as it knows that some alliance partners like the Shiv Sena are not fully onboard with the demonetisation idea. Everybody in the Parliament is now waiting to see if the BJD succeeds in playing peacemaker, particularly after some of the floor managers of BJP said that they would ensure the presence of the PM in the House.

MPs face cash crunch, host frugal dinners

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has instructed top Cabinet ministers to host dinners for groups of 50 MPs each and explain to them the rationale behind the government’s recent decision of demonetisation. The meeting is usually presided upon by party president Amit Shah and one important RSS leader. The PM drops in sometimes as a surprise. However, with demonetisation affecting all aspects of daily life, the Cabinet ministers too are facing a cash crunch and can’t afford to be extravagant when entertaining MPs. Even finance minister Arun Jaitley is believed to have asked his wife to cut back on the menu of the usual 14-15 items to just a menu with just four-five dishes. When an MP asked Union health minister JP Nadda how he would manage to pull of the dinner, he replied that if Mr Jaitley had to resort to austerity, how could he expect Mr Nadda to serve up anything more than that.

Opposition shares job of disruptive sloganeering

Most of the Opposition parties meet everyday in the morning to chalk out their strategy for the day in the house. Their usual strategy is to disrupt the proceedings of the house with continuous sloganeering against demonetisation. However, keeping up with the constant sloganeering when there are no adjournments proves to be quite taxing for the MPs. Generally, Trinamul Congress MPs lead the sloganeering with much enthusiasm. However, on Monday, they decided that they would pass on the job of sloganeering to other parties too. Initially, the sloganeering was started by TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee, who then passed on the baton to young Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi. When he got tired of sloganeering, there was no one really interested to take up the job of disruption by slogan-shouting. So then the MPs just collectively got together and started yelling, screaming and generally creating a chaotic environment in the House. Thankfully, the Speaker adjourned the House giving much needed relief to the hoarse MPs.